‘So we meet again,’ Donovan said. ‘I’ve been following you ever since that night at the country house in England.’
Bronson looked from one man to the other. The man doing the talking was unarmed, but obviously the real power lay with him. The figure standing beside him looked like a soldier, tough, composed and sure of himself, the Kalashnikov assault rifle in his hands clearly a familiar tool, another heavy rifle slung over his shoulder.
‘You’re the guy who hit me,’ Bronson said to the American, a statement, not a question.
Donovan nodded.
‘But how on earth did you follow us?’
‘When I heard you tell Jonathan Carfax that your wife worked at the British Museum, I put a tracking chip in your mobile. I was right behind you all the time you two were wasting your time digging around in Egypt.’
‘You were in the cream Mercedes,’ Bronson hazarded, ‘on the road to el-Hiba?’
‘Well spotted. Just satisfy my curiosity — how did you make the connections to find this place?’
Bronson looked at Angela. Since the intruders had appeared, she’d not said a word, but one glance was enough to tell him she was both furious and frightened. Pretty much Rule One in Bronson’s book was never irritate a man carrying an assault rifle, and definitely not a man who employed people who carried assault rifles. So before she could say something they might both regret, he intervened.
‘We really thought we were looking for the Ark of the Covenant,’ he said, placing a restraining hand on Angela’s arm. ‘At first, all the clues seemed to point to that.’
‘So that explains your trip to Egypt,’ Donovan said, looking satisfied. ‘You thought the Pharaoh Shoshenq might have seized it from the Temple of Jerusalem and taken it to Tanis? But why in hell did you think you were looking for the Ark?’
Whoever the man was, it was immediately clear that he knew what he was talking about.
Angela relaxed very slightly. ‘I found a reference in a grimoire,’ she said.
‘Which one?’
‘The Liber Juratus or Liber Sacratus,’ Angela replied. ‘It dates from the thirteenth century,’ she added.
Donovan nodded. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The Sworne Booke of Honorius, also known as the Liber Sacer.’
‘So you do know what might be in this cave?’ Angela asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Donovan said, smiling. ‘That’s why we’re here now.’
The armed man at the back of the cave — John Cross — shuffled his feet in irritation. ‘Will somebody here just tell me what the hell this is all about?’ he muttered.
Angela looked at him, then switched her gaze back to Donovan. ‘You haven’t told them?’ she demanded.
Donovan shook his head. ‘What convinced you that you weren’t on the trail of the Ark?’
‘Two things,’ Angela said tightly. ‘The first was the expression “the light which had become / the treasure”. Making that fit the Ark of the Covenant was a stretch, though we tried. But if the “treasure” becomes the “light”, as the Persian text says, then everything changes. The phrase “the treasure of the world” is one thing, but “the light of the world” means something completely different. And then there was a statement about the relic being removed from Mohalla.’
She paused and looked expectantly at Donovan, who just shook his head.
‘There’s a reference to it in the Quran,’ Angela added. ‘The full name of the place is Mohalla Anzimarah. Does that help?’
Again Donovan shook his head.
‘Anzimarah is in the Kashmir, in the old town district of Srinigar, in the Khanjar quarter. There’s a building there called the “Rozabal”, an abbreviation of Rauza Bal. The word rauza means “the tomb of the prophet”. Inside the building there are two tombs, and two gravestones. One of them is the grave of the Islamic saint Syed Nasir-ud-Din, who was buried there in the fifth century. The second, larger gravestone is for another man. Right now, Srinigar’s effectively in the middle of a war zone, but the Rozabal was investigated by several people a few years back, and details about the building are fairly well established.’
Angela took a breath. Still no one interrupted her. ‘Both the gravestones point north-south, in accordance with Muslim custom, but the actual graves are located in a crypt under the floor of the building. In the crypt, the sarcophagus of Syed Nasir-ud-Din also points north-south, as you’d expect, but the other tomb is aligned east-west, which signifies that the occupant was neither an Islamic saint nor a Hindu. Aligning a grave east-west is actually a Jewish custom. In other words, its occupant would have been a follower of Moses.’
She looked at Bronson who nodded for her to continue. ‘The name on the second tomb is Yuz Asaf, but he was also known as Yus Asaph, which translates as the “leader of the purified”, and that specifically refers to lepers who’d been cured of the disease. The first few lines of the Persian text explained how the son of “Yus of the purified” ordered that the “light which had become the treasure” was to be removed from Mohalla and taken back to the place it had come from. I assumed that meant that the light or the treasure had been located somewhere here, in this valley. The next section of the text described how the treasure was hidden in a “place of stone” in the “valley of flowers”. Put all that together and you have a recognizable description of a group of men removing something from Mohalla and hiding it out here.
‘There’s only one generally accepted meaning for the expression “the light of the world”,’ Angela stated. Bronson could tell that she had virtually forgotten she was being held at gunpoint, such was the excitement in her face. ‘I believe that two millennia ago, the son of Yus Asaph and a band of devoted followers removed one of the bodies from the tomb in Srinigar and transported it here, into this specially prepared cave in the mountains, where they hid it, hoping it would stay hidden for all eternity.’
‘But why did they do that?’ the man standing beside Donovan asked.
‘It may have been instigated by Buddhist monks. Buddhism started around five hundred BC, and by the first century AD travelling monks were visiting India and Tibet. They wouldn’t have wanted the location of the tomb to become widely known, for fear that it would become a place of pilgrimage, and they might also have worried that it could dilute the message of their own religion.
‘I also think it’s possible they spread a story that the man didn’t die here, but had returned to his own country and died there years earlier, whereas in fact he lived out his days in Kashmir. And we know he fathered a child here, a man named Isaac, according to the Persian text. In fact, I think that Isaac was either the author of that text or very closely acquainted with the person who wrote it.’
‘And there’s the Baigdandu anomaly,’ Donovan interjected.
‘That’s a contributing factor, yes,’ Angela nodded. ‘Whatever the source of the genes that throw up occasional fair-skinned, blue-eyed children in that village, you can be reasonably certain it wasn’t some wandering tribe of Greeks. It’s far more likely to have been a single source, one very different bloodline that became intermixed with the local genetic make-up.’
‘This is making no sense to me,’ John Cross interrupted. ‘What is this all about?’
Angela smiled at him, half-turned and pointed at the wall behind her. ‘On the other side of that stone door,’ she continued, ‘we’ll find a tomb, and in it will be the body of a late-middle-aged or elderly man who in his time acquired a certain reputation, both here and in the country of his birth, which is a long way to the west of here. In India, he was called Yus Asaph or Yuz Asaf, and occasionally Isa-Masih, but you all know him better by another, much more familiar, name.’
She looked around the cave, taking her time. She took a deep breath.
‘I believe that in the cavern just behind me is the last resting place of Isa-Masih or Jesus the Messiah — the man better known to you all as Jesus Christ.’